Hi all. Im Barry Mitchell and I am mostly a wedding photographer from Dundee in Scotland however (turn on the lift music) I did not start as a wedding photographer - far from it in fact. I am actually a stone mason by trade which i gave up a good few years ago to start my own website design business which I still run from this chair here in my home in Dundee Scotland. I took up photography as part of the services provided to my website design clients and soon found that I was pretty good at pointing a camera in the right direction and getting decent enough photographs. I started off with a fuji finepix s5500 which i used for a couple of years but simply could not get used to the crappy auto controls of the thing. So I put it away and didn't look at it for a while. Then my bro was visiting my house and brought with him a Fuji Finepix S9500 which had a real lens poking out the front of it and also it was a bigger chunkier affair than the crappy wee fuji i had. Any ways he gave me a loan of this camera for a few weeks and I went out and started to learn how to set up a camera - it was pretty easy i must say. The fuji became my companion for a while while i was out taking photographs of almost anything i could. Using the manual settings on it i soon learned how to do stuff. The most important setting i found was the ISO and exposure settings simply because it let me take long exposure landscapes at night (moving cars on roads etc) which i thought was totally amazing. Any way, some time later my brother visited me again and this time he had with him his new toy which was a canon Eos 20d and he said 'here man have a shot of this for a couple of days' so i took the camera away and found out that the canon Eos 20d was the camera for me! I loved it - it could do everything i wanted and all using manual settings (i dont like auto). So any ways i started going around taking some superb shots with the 20d and soon had a craving to get my self one so i did. This was amazing for what i was doing and also I got a couple of decent lenses which really helped my enthusiasm. Soon I had a decent portfolio of landscape photographs to show off on my website design site (which i was kinda making into a photography and website design site). Ok then I started to take photographs of people which i never really thought i would do simply because i dont go out much and would much rather be sitting here playing COD or some similar FPS but i soon found i was really enjoying taking photographs of people - not for the sake of having them say 'here man thanks for the photos of my children' or any of that stuff, it was really more for me to say to my self 'now that's a good photograph' - i think im more into composition than making people look fakely beautiful (even ugly people can look good with the right composition). So any way, I was really enjoying my 20d and the lenses i had but i also had a little spare cash so i got my self a 40d (only because it had a bigger screen on the back than the 20d which i thought had a crappy screen - mega pixels are not as important as people make out in my opinion - especially with gear like canon unless you are printing billboards) and with my 40d I found that i was taking better photographs all-round. Plus the buttons on the back and the quick ISO setting changes were really more efficient than the 20d.

So this is how the weddings came about. I was starting to get a little board with what i was doing then one of my website design clients phoned me and we got talking about photography and he said to me his mate was into photography and i should go meet him. So i did and he had what he called a studio in his office (really it was no more than a cupboard with a strobe and a backdrop) and we started talking about what types of photography services are in demand around our local area. I soon come to realise that there is a market in Dundee for wedding photography at a price that people simply though they were to above their station to charge so i have now filled that market (the cheaper end of the market . I charge less than most people but at the same time I am inundated with jobs (in fact im doing a wedding this afternoon). So to sum up i have fallen in to wedding photography kinda by accident but at the weddings i have shot so far, I have had a good time at them and the people have loved the photographs so i must be doing something right. Also i now have a large photography studio in Dundee's city centre and I also have an assistant to help me out at larger weddings so life is pretty sweet as far as photography goes for me.

I dont think ill stay for ever at this level and price range but for now it is where I am. I am filling a gap and when i move up the ladder some one will be there to fill my old boots so this is simply a stage in the progress on my wedding photography business and I am enjoying it very much!!

Hi Baryy,
Welcome and I'm glad you found us.
I for one like the verbose intro's over the "Hi, I'm X and I take pictures" we sometimes see.
This is quite a diversified place, and all the forum asks of you is to participate.
Hope to see some of your images here soon!

you offer an insight to growing a nice photography business from scratch.

Have you looked at galleries and studied brides books at shows and the like or you go with your own instinct, making it up as you go? Obviously you have acquired a lot of skill with your on the job training, still do you have a club or other resource to turn to when you want to add a new technique?

Our purpose is getting to an impressive photograph. So we encourage browsing and then feedback. Consider a link to your galleries annotated, C&C welcomed. Images posted within OPF are assumed to be for Comment & Critique, unless otherwise designated.